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Epiphany 2C




Saint Margaret’s

Anglican Church

Budapest, Hungary

Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10;

1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John

2:1-11

“Jesus did this, the first of his

signs, in Cana of Galilee, and

revealed his glory; and his

disciples believed in him.”

As improbable as it may seem, one of the most popular images depicted in the

great artistic period of the Renaissance in Europe, a time roughly from the 1400s to

the 1600s, was the story or scene given to us this morning in our account from the

second chapter of the Gospel of John, the Wedding Feast at Cana. Why this story,

of all the stories of the Scriptures, so caught the imagination of the artists of the

time, great and not-so-great, remains a matter of conjecture to this day among art

historians and museum curators.

Was it the inherent drama of our Lord’s first reported miracle, changing water to

wine…? Was it the human-interest element inevitable in the tale of a wedding

festival very nearly gone wrong…? Every bride’s and every bridegroom’s worst

nightmare. Was it the characterisation and biblical typology of the subject

matter…? Or was it simply the opportunity in the Renaissance to at last depict

essentially a purely secular occasion familiar to everyone, a wedding dinner, but an

occasion nevertheless still cloaked in religious terms…? It could of course be all of

this and more.

We have an early example of the genre before us this morning, the Wedding Feast

at Cana, as depicted by little-known German printmaker, Sebald Beham, probably

from the early 1530s. It is a modest affair, to be sure, the original being only some

twelve inches long by eight inches high. By my count, there are only nine figures in

the print, not much of a wedding party, then or now, if you ask me, and, O yes, one

parrot, a common artistic emblem or devise at the time denoting the presence of

the Mother of Jesus; a talking bird apparently being thought as improbable as a

virgin birth. The figure of Jesus is easy to pick out. Interestingly, no one is smiling in

the image, much less talking, which may be a reflection of the dearth of wine or

maybe of the sober German printmaker’s disposition, or preference for beer. Hard

to say.

Now, a mere thirty years later, in the early 1560s, the great Italian master, Paolo

Veronese, was, curiously I think, commissioned by the celibate Benedictine monks

of Venice to paint the same subject-matter, the Wedding Feast at Cana, for their

monastery dining room, or refectory, as it was called. And it is a masterpiece,

arguably one of the most dazzling paintings of the entire era. It puts Disney to

shame. It is huge and extravagant, like nothing ever before. Today, it is still the

largest painting in all the collections of the Louvre in Paris. There are well over one-

hundred and thirty figures on the canvas, one more sumptuously and elegantlyattired than the other. Jesus is in there somewhere, if you look close. I have not

spotted a parrot. Everyone is genuinely having a good time. It is a wedding festival

that would make proud even today’s oligarchs and hi-tech billionaires.

Now, your Sunday school homework, by the way, is to look up Paolo Veronese’s

painting and see for yourself.

The dramatic shift in the depiction of this simple Gospel narrative from Beham to

Veronese may in itself be a key to the narrative’s understanding. Jesus and his

disciples, and mother, attend a wedding festival in a Galilean village so small and

obscure that today no one knows for sure where it is or was. The happy couple

cannot have been rich and quickly become the unhappy couple as their

presumably modest wine supply runs dry, and the closest Bortarsaság outlet is

miles away. Prompted by his mother, our Lord changes the water meant for

washing, or purification, into wine and thus saves the day. A scene so homely and

ordinary that our friend Sebald Beham, the German printmaker, would have fit right

in.

Yet, it is in the midst of this, the ordinary and prosaic, that the disciples for the first

time, as the Evangelist John tells us, recognise the glory of our Lord and come to

believe in him. This arguably simple countryside wedding becomes the type or

typology of the heavenly banquet to come, as Christ and his Church are brought

together, bridegroom and bride, and we too today are united with Christ. Something

indeed to celebrate, something worth a heavenly wedding banquet. The

sumptuousness of Veronese’s wedding scene has nothing on the glory of this

heavenly banquet to come. And if Jesus’ hour has not yet come, as he cryptically

explains to his Mother, it is at least announced and foretold.

Water meant for purification becomes, as the steward proclaims, the best wine

saved for last. And it is the wine of our Eucharistic feast this morning, itself a

foretaste of the heavenly banquet, which becomes the blood of our Lord spent at

Calvary for our purification, for our redemption. The miracle of Cana is the miracle

of the abundance of God’s love and mercy toward his people. Towards us. Put

another way, in spite of or even because of the very ordinariness of our everyday

existence, great things can and do come from the abundant generosity of a loving

God. That is the glory of the Christ which the disciples discern.

Hungarian folk wisdom suggests that too many preachers like me too often preach

water but end up themselves drinking wine. Vízet prédikal és bort iszik. This

morning, my friends, I am emphatically preaching wine. I preach the wine of Cana;

I preach the abundant love of God; of God’s involvement in the very humdrum and

everyday of our existence; of God’s love which in turn makes our love for one

another real; which makes miracles and signs not only possible but inevitable. This

is after all what our Lord came to show us by his signs. This is what we see in

Boham’s modest woodcut and in Veronese’s majestic canvas.

“Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and

his disciples believed in him.” In return, I reckon we could do worse than to

ourselves take the advice of Jesus’ mother and, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Amen.The Rev. Dr. Frank Hegedűs

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